23rd Sunday after Pentecost

From a 19th Century gravestone in a British cemetery, we find the inscription:

The Saducees were trying to trap Jesus into admitting that he was teaching something that simply made no sense to anyone. It wasn't the first time that someone tried to trap Jesus and certainly wouldn't be the last. Even at his trial the authorities mocked Jesus with questions that were meant only to trap him or prove that something about him was not as it seemed. It is a common way to present arguments even today. Put up a straw example that looks quite a lot like the thing you want to disprove and then destroy it with blazing arguments.

The Saducees had no interest in getting to know what Jesus was teaching. They had no real interest in learning from him. They just wanted to show him up. They, like so many people who talked to Jesus about God, didn't want to discuss God, they wanted to discuss their own beliefs and practices and try to make themselves look good in the process.

It's easy to miss the point and focus on something that looks and sounds interesting but is simply a waste of time. Rabbi Hirsch and Rabbi Moskowitz reminded us this week at the dinner for the Center for Christian Jewish Dialogue that there is speech that is pleasing to God and there is speech that wastes the very breath used to make it. This is an unholy act and not worthy of anyone, but particularly not worthy of any of us, Christian or Jew, as we discuss God and our faith.

It's easy to look at the Bible and see how often that was the kind of speech used by people who didn't want to learn what Jesus was trying to teach. The lawyer who asked which commandment was the greatest followed up Jesus' answer that spoke of "loving God and loving your neighbor" with what was supposed to be a trick, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus responded with the story we often call the Good Samaritan.

And there was the question posed by the authorities about paying a tax to Caesar. "You teach righteousness", they seemed to be saying, "but what happens to your righteousness when it's faced with the real world and having to pay money to support a regime that is unholy and unrighteous?" Jesus asked to see the coin, which they produced, and asked whose image was imprinted on the coin. They told him that the image belonged to Caesar. So Jesus made the point that if they were going to use Caesar's money then why would they complain about paying Caesar to use something that was his?

All of these questions beg the real question. "Who is God and what does God want from us?" Jesus and the prophets answered that question over and over. "Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God", Micah tells us. "Love your neighbor as yourself", is quoted from Leviticus by Jesus. Above all else, love God with all your heart and soul and mind because it is God who created us in the beginning and makes us real right now. Without God, we would simply cease to exist.

But it's easy to get caught up in these other questions because they are about something important to us; they are about this life we are living. Marriage is an enormous part of anyone's life who is married, so what will happen to this enormous part of our lives once we are united with God in Heaven? Taxes are an enormous part of our lives; what does God have to say about taxes? How we treat others and how they treat us is another issue that takes up a great deal of our time.

We have rules, laws, and customs about how to deal with our neighbors; but does God have anything to say to us about how we are to treat our neighbors? What does God say about how we are to treat our Afghan neighbors? Our gay neighbors? Our "right wing Christian militia - I'm going to kill all you people who don't look like me" neighbor? Our Mormon neighbors?

Is it wrong to ask those questions? Is it wrong to be concerned about them? No, it's not wrong to ask the questions. The reason the Gospel authors include them is probably that they are pertinent questions that deal with matters in everyday life. If God is not concerned about our everyday life, how will we understand God to care about us at all? No, the subjects of the questions are not bad in themselves. It is how they are asked, and the way that they are used to try and pervert the meaning of the subject, that turns them into the kind of speech that is intended to bring about dissension and discord rather than an honest search for the truth.

The questions given to Jesus in this manner all have something in common. The person proposing the question already had an answer in mind. Naturally, Jesus chose a different answer and the person was unsatisfied in the quest to deride Jesus and his view of the law, the prophets and God. But this seems to be a key to many of these stories. Jesus knew he was being tried in the court of public opinion and that the accusers already had an opinion of his guilt. Rather than come out and say, "I believe this to be true" and present their argument, they chose to try to make Jesus look bad and then infer that whatever it was that they thought must, therefore, look good.

When we read the Gospel, we can see how the trick backfires. I can imagine being one of the disciples who traveled around with Jesus and heard these trick questions time and again. Not that the disciples always asked brilliant questions of Jesus, but they were not trying to trick him. I have to wonder if they ever saw any of these trick questions coming and tried to help set up the poor questioner.

"Sure, that's a great question about the widow and her getting married to all those brothers. Don't you think so Peter?"

"Oh you bet, John. I'm positive Jesus would have a tough time with that question. Maybe we could get you right up front when you ask it so everybody could hear you really well."

"Great idea! You just follow Peter right up front there and I'll give you the high sign when people have gotten quiet back here. We wouldn't want anyone to miss this, would we?"

They kept coming and kept asking questions for which they believed that they knew the answer. This week the answer was that there is no resurrection of the dead. When we die we are gone from the earth and are a memory to those left behind and a memory to God. That was the answer they wanted everyone to believe; but rather than say that and risk people not believing it on the merits of the argument they chose to frame it as a question that seemed to show the absurdity of the idea of resurrection. The problem was that they had made up their minds and were not trying to learn about God or seek the truth, they were just trying to look good to themselves and the crowd by making someone else look foolish.

So how do we tell the difference between an honest question and a trick question? Ask any teenager and they can tell you. Look at the agenda of the question. Is it the same as the subject or does it lead somewhere else?

"Mom, do we have any milk left for cereal? No? Dad we're running low on milk for your breakfast. Would you like me to get you some? Got the keys to the car Dad?"

We learn these tricks at an early age. Long before she can even sit in the front seat of a car, my daughter can ask, in the most innocent voice, if I'm hungry for a taco. Of course, she knows I'll eat a taco anytime. So she expects the answer to be yes and then she can offer to go with me to Taco Bell. She is very kind. I am blessed to go to Taco Bell often and I'm afraid that I'm teaching something that will get away from me.

Neither of those examples, however, is very malicious. They don't really point out the kind of questions that we find people asking Jesus. Neither of them tries to make someone else look bad. So there is more to it than just having an agenda. The agenda differing from the subject may be the first part, but the questions put to Jesus have an added dimension of trying to prove someone wrong and thereby prove the questioner to be right.

Is this really so bad, though? After all, don't many of us use this tactic in trying to ferret out weaknesses in a position or a person? The truth is, we probably do use this tactic to our advantage at home and at school and at work. The problem is that it is not a search for the truth - but a search to find fault. When we use this kind of tactic with those we love then we are setting them up to look faulty in our eyes. Or we are setting ourselves up to look as foolish as the Pharisees and Saducees when the questions backfire and don't have the answers that we expected and counted on to ridicule someone else.

When we search honestly for the truth we are truly searching for an answer that we do not yet have, not trying to prove what we already know to be true by any means possible. When people came to Jesus searching for the truth, as Mary did when she sat at Jesus' feet while others worked, or as Zacchaeus did when he climbed the tree to get a glimpse of Jesus and then took him into his home for a meal, they were rewarded with a relationship with the Truth. This is much more than the simple understanding of an intellectual proposition. It is an intimate experience of the Truth of God in the person of Jesus the Christ.

When we seek God's truth, we have to seek it honestly or it is not truth we will find, because we will not be open to the relationship that truth requires of us, that God requires of us. We may seek truth and find no sure answers for a long time, because answers are not necessarily what God gives us when we put ourselves in relationship with Him. We will get answers. But the answers will come as we open ourselves to the vulnerability of God's love and care for us.

We "understand" grace and can talk about it intellectually, but we "know" grace when we have descended to some difficult period in our life and have awakened one day to realize that God loves us, miserable as we are. All of a sudden, we are part of God's grace and we know the truth about grace in a way that no book on theology could ever tell us.

The Saducees and Pharisees who question Jesus are not looking for truth or even for the relationship with God that finding the truth takes. They are looking for answers. They are looking to be right. We must look to be wrong and to have no answers to some of our questions while we search and, strangely, we will find God there in our vulnerability and perhaps He will be able to speak to us, helping us to live with an answer we did not expect or live without the answer we had hoped to find. He may even help us to live with more questions than we asked when we began the quest. But we will have God in our hearts and we will trust that God is the Truth.

God does care about our marriages and other relationships in our families, our schools and our work. God does care about our taxes as well as our tithes. Because God cares about us in the here and now, not just the hereafter. The questions we ask of God do matter to Him, and not just because they are of eternal significance, but because caring and loving is what God does best. God created us to be in relationship with Him, so we must ask questions. We must search for the Truth, not just answers that fit our way of seeing things. We are on a journey that will take us ever closer to God as we pray, study and take seriously the quest to be in a relationship with the God who loves and cares for each one of us. Pray. Study. Ask. But most of all love and be open to love. That is where the answers lie.